There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went, at her own volition, to clerk in Finley’s two story department store on High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback were openly sweethearts. Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up, although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant. He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream. Hester was one of them. It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore a crisp percale shirt-waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points to them. They were in the very heart of Wallach’s Grove, under a natural cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions of soda-water and beer-bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet. He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picnickers’ immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him. “Tickle-tickle!” she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig. He caught at her hand. “Hester,” he said, “marry me.” She felt a foaming through her until her finger-tips sang. “Well, I like that!” was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed profile that was like that same gazelle’s smelling the moon. He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not. “You’re too poor,” she said. He sat back without speaking for a long minute. “Money isn’t everything,” he said finally, and with something gone from his voice. “I know,” she said, looking off; “but it’s a great deal if you happen to want it more than anything else in the world.” “Then, if that’s how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I want it, too, more than anything else in the world.” “There’s no future in bookkeeping.” “I know a fellow in Cincinnati who’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man. Hester? Dear?” “A week?” “Why, of course not, dear--a month.” “Faugh!” she said, still looking off. He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.